Willing

by Scott Spencer

  I sent my ideas to my agent via e-mail. When I wasn’t trolling the Internet for still more ideas—I needed more than just one or two to sell if I was ever going to escape the minute-by-minute humiliation of staying put—I was checking my e-mail to see if anyone had bitten. But there were no takers—I got a Maybe on the Knopfler idea, but Rolling Stone only wanted five hundred words at $2.25 per word. (Do the math, as the sadists say.) Not only that, but my agent was barely responding to my ideas. I was becoming a pest, and I knew it. But somehow knowing it was not quite enough to force me to stop.

  I could not just sit there and do nothing without filling up with jealousy and sadness, and a feeling of such overwhelming shame I was almost ready to believe that everything in my life that had ever gone wrong was entirely my own fault, every wound self-inflicted, every slap in the face accompanied by the stinging of my own palm. Inundating myself with images and information from my computer was like running a white noise machine in your apartment to drown out the sounds of traffic. I was drowning out wondering where Deirdre was, and what she was doing, and with whom, and I was drowning out the coyote yowl of my own loneliness.

  It was hard for me to leave the apartment during business hours; I thought my agent might call at any time, with some rescuing good news, news too vital to my survival to trust to my cheap cell phone. If I were to be plucked from the pit of my own personal hell, I wanted it to happen on a land line; I wanted to hear every word, every number, and I wanted the privacy to fall to my knees with relief. I ran a few simple errands—milk for my thousand cups of coffees, rum for my Diet Cokes, pints of prefab tuna salad—but for the most part I might as well have been under house arrest, with an electronic sensor around my ankle. The evenings were, of course, more difficult; they always are. The introduction of electric light and our gradual evolution into a twenty-four-hour-society have done little to cut down on the intrinsic peril of the hours between eight and eight. I wasn’t worried about the things my night-fearing distant relations had once feared: saber-toothed tigers, rampaging Cossacks. What unnerved me were my thoughts of Deirdre—what a thing to fear! I feared the woman upon whose breast I had slept, the woman whose body I had so casually enjoyed, the woman whose youth I had always assumed made her an unsuitable match; I feared creamy soft red-haired freckle-shouldered Deirdre. I dreaded her coming into our penitential apartment and sensing the internal rot of me, I feared what I might say to her, I feared what I might do, and I feared, above all, what I would—and did—feel when she failed to come home at all.

  The streets, restaurants, clubs, theaters, and shops of New York are filled with people who would rather not be in their apartments at night. Whereas once I had experienced this constant activity as a kind of ceaseless frantic unbounded commercialism, a nonstop effort to soak up as many dollars from as many people as possible, I now saw the we-never-close side of Manhattan as a great humanitarian effort on behalf of those of us who not only would rather not be at home but could not be at home. What would I have done if I had been in my predicament in Joliet or Eugene? But in New York there were always movie theaters I could slip into, where I could watch depictions of other people’s troubles. There were a million bars. Within walking distance of my apartment, there were places to listen to jazz, blues, bluegrass, Persian classical music, klezmer, suburban hip-hop, samba, Afro-Cuban, Turkish, Greek, and Russian music, and where you could ride out the evening on a carpet of song. No one looked at you twice for being alone. I saw plays by Shakespeare, Mike Leigh, Brecht. These were awfully tough on the purse, but they filled the time and they provided people for me to sit with and share an emotional experience. I wasn’t the only one alone in these places, nor was I the only one who walked the streets by myself. Yet I felt loneliness filling me up. A man without a woman is a wretched thing, prone to disease, mental illness, crime; and a man alone whose woman is on the frolic with someone else is exponentially more wretched still. Women rushed by like white water, and they moved past me as if I were a rock. More than once, I thought about just bumping into one of them, just to have the feel of human flesh. Between the theaters and my apartment there were dozens of pornography shops and before long it was more than I could do to resist their sneaky rancid allure. Every once in a while I ducked into one of these Lysol-scented storefronts with their purplish lighting and recently paroled clerks and there I would stand as if in a fugue state and look at pictures of naked women, like a castaway looking for a little dot of hope on the horizon. For a minute or two the sight of these unknown women made me stop thinking of Deirdre (and Osip), and then, when I put the magazine down, I couldn’t even say I was back where I’d started from, because, in fact, everything was a little bit worse.

  ONE EVENING, I got back to Fifty-fourth Street, and Deirdre was not yet home. Her perforated gray Swedish slip-on shoes were there, her maroon backpack, the yellow grin of a half-eaten toasted cheese sandwich. The emptiness of the apartment was squeezing me like a vise. It was terrible to be skulking around those rooms when Deirdre was home, but it was no better when she was away. She had at one point told me that she had stopped seeing Osip, but I did not believe her. I did not believe her for one simple reason: it was a lie.

  I knew it was a lie because I had proof. Two days after the confession, feeling so humiliated I avoided mirrors, I found Deirdre’s diary, stowed in a defiantly obvious place, between the mattress and the box spring. What was I doing waving my hand around in this cramped space? Looking for the diary. I knew she kept one. I had seen her write in it, and there it was, in the very first place I looked. I stood in the bedroom, my heart hiccuping. I held the tall, narrow notebook, with its decorative, marbleized cover and mock Victorian leather corners. I knew the rules governing privacy, boundaries, et cetera, but I was unable to resist. I opened to the first page: there was a list of the classes she was taking, the professors, the times. I opened to the middle and found a log of phone numbers: embassies, doctors, computer repair shops. On the next page there was one sentence, written in Deirdre’s neat, conventional script: I’m so so tired of my hair. Fuck you, I’d said, so loudly that I startled myself, and then on the next page: at last, Poor Avery, I have bruised his ego. I guess my dream of him and me staying friends is never going to be. Him and me? What an ignorant, ungrammatical tramp.

  He’s such a sweet guy. The gentlest. Maybe too gentle for me? I can’t believe the way I’ve screwed everything up. And for what? Vanity and curiosity? Come on, Deirdre, when are you going to get a clue? I’m still in that head space from when I was fourteen. Poor Avery. I don’t even know why I keep thinking of him like that. I have to keep reminding myself how many times he told me that our love was just a shipboard romance, and that we would never end up together. He probably thought he was being honorable telling me that over and over, but each time was like a slap in my face. I was never fucking mean to him! Like about how sometimes he smells weird. I could have said so, but I didn’t. I never wanted him to feel that bad.

  I had never read anything quite so shocking in my whole life. I rolled up my shirtsleeve, sniffed my forearm. It smelled faintly of soap. Surely she could not have meant that. I smelled my hands, my shoulders, my underarms. What was the problem? I tried to put it out of my mind…

  Then, on the next page: Osip tonight. Yippee! It wasn’t so horrifying as reading about my so-called smell, but it was close. Of course, it’s what you risk when you snoop. It’s what the cuckolds must feel when the detectives they hire come back with evidence confirming their worst fears. Photographs, theater programs, telephone bills, hotel registrations, tickets to Jamaica. Yet this wound, this wound of proof, I could not stop inflicting it on myself. It was like some vicious erotica created just for me. Day after day, while Deirdre was away at school, or at night, when she was supposedly out with friends or studying late at the library, I walked (whistling an insanely jaunty little tune) back to the bedroom, fished out the diary, and read the latest installments. There were days that went by in which nothing was rec
orded, days I would experience the blank page with a mixture of frustration and relief. And there were days in which the entries had nothing to do with Osip or anything else of a sexual nature, entries devoted to daydreams of her postgraduate life, or accounts of her conversations with family members, or lists of books she needed to read. But there were also a shocking number of entries devoted to Osip and their ecstatic couplings, all recounted in great detail, with a kind of pornographic concentration, as if she planned one day in her lonely old age to relive these memories and recall herself at the peak of her vitality. In the mouth, on the table, on the floor, in a rocking chair; they could not, it seemed, be with each other for more than an hour without exchanging fluids. Even her occasional criticisms of Osip were daggers to my heart.

  O says I have been wasting myself with American boyfriends. LOL, he thinks that sex is a Russian specialty. I don’t think he even understands that for women it’s about emotions. Not ALL about emotions, of course.

  And, a page later:

  O was really in a rush, like we had to finish before the secret police knocked on the door. I clamped my legs closed to try and keep him inside me. Stay stay, I feel like crying when he pulls out. But he won’t. Grrrrr. He takes himself elsewhere, leaving nothing behind but the faint odor of bread.

  I really had had no idea she was so olfactorily inclined. And that bit about the bread? I had said that to Deirdre. About her. She was using my tune while she danced with him.

  Throughout the day, I had white-knuckled it through my hours alone in the apartment and forced myself not to look at her diary; the grim restless sexual energy was spent, instead, surfing the Internet. But coming back one night after sitting comatose through a supposedly rousing and artful Chinese martial arts epic, all I could think of was now it was time to check in on Deirdre’s journal. I really didn’t want to. I sat on the sofa for a few moments, gently rocking back and forth, wondering if I ought to go back into the bedroom, take the diary out, destroy it, or perhaps read it all carefully, page by page, banality by banality, let the full force of the thing go into me like nails hammered in by a furious drunken carpenter, maybe even have the filthy thing out on my lap when Deirdre returned from whatever sexual calisthenics she was engaged in.

  I’ve got to pull myself together, I thought, and the first step would be to stop reading her fucking diary, since that’s what it literally was. I drank some gin, took a Tylenol PM. I pulled out the sofa bed, slapped away some dust and popcorn kernels that had slipped through the cushions and onto the sheet, took the down comforter out of the cabinet, and spread it across what was now my bed. Buying a new goose down comforter had taken some of the grimness out of sleeping on the convertible sofa, though I sometimes wondered what had become of the goose itself. Did they simply pluck every last feather from it, or had it been butchered? I looked at the bed, tried to think well of it. Nice, nice, I said to myself. Very nice.

  Somehow I fell asleep, and when I awoke it was still dark—but it was always dark in that apartment. I looked at my watch. Three thirty in the morning. Deirdre was home, in the bedroom, with the door closed. I heard music playing, Bach unaccompanied cello sonatas. She had lately been lulling herself to sleep with music—following the line of the melody got her off the hamster wheel of her own thinking. I lay there, listening through the door to the sadness and tenderness of the music, this spire of sound that reached all the way to heaven. I couldn’t help myself, the music made me think about getting into bed with her. The body’s great joke at the soul’s expense was that since that terrible evening our three separate nights of sex were the most passionate and uninhibited of our lives together. Let’s do unmentionable things, she had whispered to me. She had always been free with her body, eager for pleasure. I spontaneously combust, she said, and I, unable to relinquish my position as elder in our village of two, the purveyor of maturity and wisdom, said that spontaneous combustion was no way to heat a home; you needed something regular, controlled; you needed to know you could twist the dial on the thermostat and the furnace would ignite. And Deirdre said Then do it, just shut up and twist my dial, and before I could argue it any further, she rolled onto her side, took my hand and guided it toward where she wanted it. But she said other things, too. She said Oh, not now, and she said I don’t think we’d better, and she said Let’s not do things that make us sad. I could not bear to be turned away by her; it was too much, on top of everything else. Do you love me or do you not? I finally blurted out, and her wide placid face darkened—for a moment I thought she was going to slap me, and finally she said, Why didn’t you care when it still mattered?

  The bedroom door opened, and Deirdre emerged. She stood motionless for a moment and then, before I could say anything, she rushed toward the bathroom and closed the door behind her. I heard the light click on in the bathroom, saw its diffuse glow leaking out from beneath the door. Then: the rodenty squeak of the sink’s faucets twisting open. The rush of water. The clatter of the toilet’s lid, hastily lifted, hitting against the tank. Through the white noise of the rushing water, I heard her voice, a small cracked suffering groan. I wondered if there were something I ought to do. And then—of course, I should have guessed—the sound of retching. I thought I heard her say “Osip,” but it could have been “Oh shit.” The toilet flushed thunderously, more retching, more flushing—and then she turned on the shower.

  She must have had a great deal to drink, I thought. I could see her, with him, downing shots, losing inhibitions…And then, suddenly, without knowing what train of thought had brought me to this point, I was standing, moving toward the bedroom. I listened to make sure the shower was still running, and then I crouched down, reached under what had once been my mattress, groped around, felt something hard and rectangular, and pulled out her diary. I stood up quickly, dizzily. The digital readout window of her boom box cast a dark blue light in the little bedroom; every other moment the word Good-bye flashed. I loathed that I was acting so dishonorably, but there it was. I’d always wondered how low I could sink. Yet even now I felt more anxiety than guilt. Shame and conscience prove to be rather small next to the looming fear of being found out, discovered, seen through. I turned on the bedside lamp; the bulb was still warm. I opened the journal, turned to see if she had written anything new since last I looked. She had! Tonight was grim. First an hour of him holding forth on global warming. Then the moment of truth! He’s been lobbying for me to try “it,” and I finally gave in. I told him a little lie and said I had never done it like that before. Well, it was sort of true. I never did it with A or with G. G was so big it would have killed me anyhow. So it’s been 2 yrs, the way I see it I am a virgin there again. O was so excited I don’t think he knew where he was or who I was. I tried to experience his excitement. Forget it. All I could feel was Ow. And it’s like pooping in reverse.

  I gasped, shut the book, tried to prevent what I had just read from sinking in. Suddenly I was aware that I was no longer hearing the shower, and I shoved the book back under the mattress, turned off the lamp, and hurried back to my sofa bed, feeling sick with jealousy and shame, plus murderous rage.

  A few moments later, I lifted myself up on my elbows in what I thought was a fine mimicry of a man just coming awake as Deirdre emerged from the bathroom.

  Are you okay? I asked, to which she replied Ichhh, and hurried past.

  I lay flat again. The mattress felt like a few sheets of newspaper spread out over scaffolding. I wondered if Deirdre’s growl of disgust was meant to refer to her stomach or to me. I thought about this, and then a kind of soft nothingness filled my mind, like dim, diffuse light from a hidden source. I felt something akin to peace. Life for a moment was a little less mysterious. Deirdre was heartless; I was worthless; it was all pretty simple…

  In the morning, I opened my eyes to the timeless gloom of the living room. I smelled coffee, the burned edges of a fried egg. I assumed Deirdre was in the kitchen, and I hurried to the bathroom, washed my face, teeth, tongue. I would have li
ked the physical gravitas of a hangover; it might have counteracted the anxiety I felt upon waking, that nervedout high hum pulsating through my brain.

  The kitchen was messy, and Deirdre was gone. I sat at the half table we were able to squeeze into the tiny space, finished the dregs of her sweet coffee, and ate the couple bites of toast she had left behind. There was something abject and canine about eating her scraps that held some sort of appeal, the dank pleasure of slipping down another notch.

  I filled the teakettle, set it atop the blue chrysanthemum of the gas flame, and, seemingly without thinking about it, walked into the bedroom, dropped to my knees, and plunged my hand into the space between the mattress and the box spring. My fingers groped, felt nothing but darkness. I slid my palm back and forth. I felt…something. Not the journal, however. I pulled it out. An envelope. With my name on it, written in pen. My heart was beginning to race. I opened the envelope carefully, as if I might have to reseal it, put it back. There was a single piece of pale green notebook paper in it, its edge ragged from having been ripped out of its spiral binder. I unfolded it. A single sentence, written in Deirdre’s plump cursive. Shame on you, Avery, shame shame shame on you.

  I trudged back to the front of the apartment and walked to the windows overlooking Seventh Avenue, looked out through the grime that was so thick it was like gauze. Seven stories below, traffic was stopped; in the middle of a congestion of yellow cabs, a red and white ambulance from St. Clare’s Hospital sat, its lights frantically flashing. Every so often the ambulance let out a siren whoop, a cry of anguish, but no one budged; it was like the blow of an ax against a frozen sea, completely hopeless.